Madame Monce, the proprietor of a
hotel on the Rue du Coq D’Or in Paris, is arguing with one of her lodgers, whom she accuses of squashing
bugs on the wallpaper. Other lodgers on the narrow, squalid street jump into the fight.
George Orwell, the narrator of this memoir of poverty, paints a picture of the neighborhood, a typical early 20th Century Paris slum where rents are reasonable and crime and vermin are as common as drunkenness.